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[Nightowl]

If you're like me, then you receive .docx, MS Word 2007 files every once in a while. If you're like me, then you dislike emailing back asking the person who sent the .docx file to you to re-send it to you as a .doc or other format. Or, perhaps you're stuck with using a file conversion service such as zamzar, which sometimes takes a few hours to send you the result during active times of the day.

Fine, so, what can you do about it? . . .

Depends. If you use Windows as your primary operating system, and have an older version of MS Word, such as 2003, then there's a Microsoft plugin for that.

But, if you use OpenOffice on Windows or Linux, then things are a little trickier. On windows, you've got some options. On linux, however, you've got Odfconvert.

There's a good howto available on how to do this. However, I'll paraphrase them into here for simplicity. ;)

This is done on an amd64 Debian Sid installation, FYI. The process for other distros is similar.

First, download either the x86 or amd64/x86_64 file.

Yes, yes, I know they're rpm archives. That's not a problem, however . . .

While those are downloading, as root (or using sudo if you're a Ubuntu user), run apt-get install rpm libgif4 cpio. Yeah, I know cpio is installed by default. Good practice to include all used utilities. ;)

Wait for the above two to complete. (Note that most of you won't have any problems here. Your internet connections can probably handle a 6MB download in a few moments. Mine, however, can't . . .)

Change to the directory where you downloaded the .rpm to and create a temporary directory . . .

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cd ~/downloads
mkdir -p /tmp/odfconvert
cp odf-converter*.rpm /tmp/odfconvert
cd /tmp/odfconvert

Good. Now, extract the archive . . .

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rpm2cpio odf-converter* |cpio -ivd

Now (as root or with sudo for you ubuntu people), copy the executable into /usr/bin, where you'll probably want it. If you don't have root access, then simply replace /usr/bin with ~/bin/.

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cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/bin/

If you're like me, you'll need a symlink for libtiff.so.3 . . . (this requires root access or sudo access. If you don't have root access, consider creating a wrapper script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH and create a symlink yourself.)

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cd /usr/lib
ln -s libtiff.so.4 libtiff.so.3
cd -

Clean up after yourself . . .

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cd ..
rm -rf odfconvert

Now, to test it!

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cd ~/downloads
OdfConverter /i thedocxfiletoconvert.docx

Wait a moment or two, and . . .

Wait, what's this? A .odt file! It can't be!

It gets better! You can additionally convert .odt *back into .docx*. If you need to do this, just give OdfConverter a .odt file ;)

[Nobbit]

In case you get stuck here

Now (as root or with sudo for you ubuntu people), copy the executable into /usr/bin, where you'll probably want it. If you don't have root access, then simply replace /usr/bin with ~/bin/.

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cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/Odfconverter /usr/bin/

it might depend on the fact, that the Terminal is case-sensitiv, so change the "c" in Odfconverter to a capital "C":

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cp usr/lib/ooo-2.0/program/OdfConverter /usr/bin/

It will work fine then.

[Cleo]

It's not the terminal that is case sensitive, it's the file system.

Guess Nightowl made a tpyo.

[Nightowl]

That you are correct . . . my bad. I typed that all out without trying it . . . #1 thing not to do when posting a HOWTO.

I'll edit the original.

[Nobbit]

I learn a lot from the high-teacher here! How would I know WHAT is case sensitive - but in the end: It works in practice, theory doesn't matter (I always wanted to say that, cause most of the time it is me who has to hear this )

[Nightowl]

Though, linux will sometimes handle non-case-sensitive filesystems (like vfat, ntfs) as case-sensitive, as well. The vfat driver will output a message like . . .

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Apr 11 23:59:37 ginkgo kernel: [126518.230847] FAT: utf8 is not a recommended IO charset for FAT filesystems, filesystem will be case sensitive!

 . . . when, (like me) you use UTF-8.

Makes for some confusion amongst ported programs, sometimes . . .

In any case, I do hope that being able to convert DOCXes to ODFs will help you in some way . . . I had fairly major problems, since I was being sent a few dozen .DOCXes at a time.